Sarah Meier, ETH Zurich

Eric Strobl, University of Bern

Robert J. R. Elliott, University of Birmingham

In many regions of the world fire seasons have been lengthening, alongside increases in wildfire frequency and intensity. Climate change, shifts in land use, and the expansion of human settlements into fire-prone areas have transformed wildfires from largely localised hazards into systemic risks with cascading effects across ecosystems and economies. These developments have rendered many existing models, policies, and assumptions increasingly outdated, underscoring the urgent need for robust economic evidence to inform policy and private-sector decision making aligned with current and future wildfire conditions.

Wildfires and smoke pollution affect economies through multiple, interconnected channels. Beyond direct suppression costs and physical damages, wildfires disrupt production and supply chains, reduce labour productivity, influence tourism and recreation, and reshape migration and housing-market dynamics. Smoke exposure generates substantial public health burdens and impairs cognitive performance and labour market outcomes. These impacts occur within a context of rising public expenditures on prevention, suppression, and recovery, as well as rapidly evolving policy debates around insurance markets, land-use regulation, adaptation, and risk financing. Together, these dynamics highlight the need for empirical research that quantifies welfare consequences and evaluates the effectiveness of emerging policy responses.

Despite growing attention, many ecological and economic impacts of wildfires and smoke, particularly with regard to their persistence, remain under-studied, especially in regions that have not historically experienced large-scale wildfires but are now facing emerging risks. Cross-regional comparison can therefore support knowledge exchange between regions with long-standing fire experience and those facing emerging vulnerabilities, including across the Global North and South. At the same time, recent advances in data availability, remote sensing, and the use of AI-based technologies for monitoring, early warning, and suppression create new opportunities for applied research.

This Special Issue seeks contributions that advance empirical and policy-relevant understanding of wildfire impacts, as well as analyses that evaluate adaptation and management strategies aimed at reducing their welfare costs. We welcome applied research grounded in environmental, climate, and resource economics, including studies that use new data or innovative identification strategies to address this emerging challenge. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged where it strengthens economic insight into wildfire impacts and informs policy decisions.

Potential topics

• Labour productivity, sectoral employment shifts, and worker mobility
• Housing markets, mortgage risk, and migration and other behavioural responses to wildfire risk and exposure
• Natural capital and ecosystem service valuation, including impacts on biodiversity, recreation, and forest asset pricing
• Inequality, information access, and distributional impacts of exposure and monitoring technologies
• Public finance, insurance markets, and the fiscal consequences for local and regional governments
• Institutions, governance, and risk-sharing arrangements, including coordination across jurisdictions, public-private roles, and firm responses to wildfire risk
• Prevention, suppression, and adaptation strategies, including land-use planning, prescribed burning, indigenous fire stewardship, and advanced monitoring and management technologies
• Welfare losses from smoke exposure, including physical and mental health outcomes and associated human capital effects

Timeline

• September 30, 2026: Submission deadline

Sanchayan Banerjee, King's College London

Lory Barile, University of Warwick

Traditional environmental economics addresses market failures (e.g., externalities, public goods, asymmetric information), using regulation and price-based instruments under a rational choice benchmark. Decades of evidence on bounded rationality, bounded self-interest, and bounded willpower reveal systematic departures from that benchmark, generating behavioural failures that can blunt or distort policy. These departures are well documented across core domains (e.g., environmental valuation, discounting of future outcomes and assets, and utility maximisation) and have given rise to a vibrant subfield: Behavioural Environmental Economics & Policy (BEEP).

This Special Issue will consolidate and showcase new contributions and evidence on how behavioural insights improve the design, delivery, and evaluation of environmental policy. Although BEEP has grown substantially, few efforts have mapped its diverse applications. We aim to fill this gap by providing theoretical, actionable, and evidence-based guidance for researchers and practitioners on putting BEEP into practice. Framed this way, the Special Issue will serve as a practical reference, grounded in recent cases that show why recognising and addressing human behaviour (and its failures) is essential to tackling urgent challenges, from climate change and biodiversity loss to air and water pollution.

We welcome conceptual/theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented submissions that apply behavioural insights to understand, explain, or solve environmental problems. We particularly encourage quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method designs (e.g., field/lab experiments, quasi-/natural experiments, RCTs, process evaluations), though literature reviews and theoretical contributions will also be considered. Overall, we seek contributions that diagnose and integrate market and behavioural failures and that design, test, and evaluate policies, including 'green nudges', that are both effective and welfare-enhancing.

Potential topics

• Interactions between market failures and behavioural failures in environmental settings
• Policy design that combines prices/standards with behavioural tools (defaults, salience/framing, simplification, commitment)
• Welfare analysis (including psychological costs), ethics, and paternalism in environmental policy
• Empirical identification of behavioural mechanisms; field/lab/quasi-experimental evidence
• Heterogeneity, equity, and distributional consequences of behavioural environmental policies
• Replication, meta-analysis, and open-science practices in this domain
• Choice architecture and environmental outcomes
• Interactions between behavioural instruments and prices/regulation
• Welfare measurement and persistence (including psychological costs)
• Distributional and equity dimensions
• Climate cognition and communication
• Evaluation and methods

Timeline

• November 30, 2026: Submission deadline

This special issue focuses on market-based measures and economic instruments designed to mitigate emissions from ports and the shipping industry. The collection seeks to advance understanding of how market mechanisms can effectively reduce environmental impacts while maintaining economic competitiveness in the maritime sector.

The issue welcomes contributions exploring various market-based approaches including carbon pricing, emission trading systems, green bonds, subsidies for clean technologies, and other economic instruments. Papers may examine these mechanisms from theoretical, empirical, or policy perspectives, with particular interest in their effectiveness, design, implementation challenges, and real-world outcomes.

Potential topics

• Market-based mechanisms for reducing port and shipping emissions
• Carbon pricing and emission trading systems in maritime transport
• Economic instruments for incentivizing sustainable shipping practices
• Port authority policies and market-based approaches
• Life cycle assessment and environmental impact of shipping
• Technological innovations and market adoption in emissions reduction
• Regulatory frameworks and market-based policy integration
• Case studies of successful market-based emissions mitigation strategies

Timeline

• August 28, 2026: Manuscript submission deadline

Timeline

• August 27, 2026: Submission deadline